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Monday, October 29, 2012

Thoughts on Constructal Theory

Fundamental ideas are few and far between. Professor Bejan has proposed a new scientific principle. You can learn more in his book, Design in Nature. TED Bucharest. Webpage.

Flow is such that in time, flow is more and more easy. He believes this principle explains why flows are persistent.

Here I search for applications of the principle for Quantum Systems.

The key concept is persistence. On the other hand, the principle requires time's arrow. For atomic scale bodies, past and future are equivalent. Time appears when Information enters the picture. Quantum Information though, does have a direction in time. One will have to accept another interpretation of Quantum Mechanics to incorporate the Constructal Law.

I believe that Quantum Mechanics, as all other fundamental laws, which can be derived from an extremum principle, are our description of reality, not reality. As descriptions go, they are intrinsically directed in time, because we are. A Quantum Theory of Information, thus, describes a real field, the Quantum Field, but our description of it, is directed in time. Bejan's Law can be incorporated, as our observation, that persistent flows take into account, past flows for future flows, i.e., there is memory.

Another problem altogether, is where that Information is stored. I propose the use of the Cellular Automaton which follows rule 110, in Wolfram's classification. This is the simplest universal computer I am aware of, discovered independently by Harold V. McIntosh, and Matthew Cook. Wikipedia. How in Nature is this rule coded? I don't know. As a human description though, it does not matter, we have to Decode Reality, as Vlatko Vedral explains in his book "Decoding Reality". Wikipedia.

Finally: We have the problem of the Holographic principle. Why everything is coded in two dimensions? I believe that this means that we can use the simplest mathematical model which shows a phase transition in Statistical Mechanics, and two dimensions are enough.

Putting these elements together - Constructal, Holographic, and Automatonical - is a task for later. One will guarantee permanence, and the other two minimanility, and completeness, respectively. This seems like a nice framework to decode reality. Whether or not, reality really works like that, is a question in philosophy not in science.

The purpose of this effort, is to construct an autopoeitic model of reality, i.e., one that maintains, and builds itself self consistently.